Isopropyl on a rag got it off quickly for me.

outofbreath – Member
Wouldn’t a Xenophobic kids footie coach be a bit more subtle than that?

Probably not.

The older Bell Super 2R was really narrow until the latest ones, probably worth a go if you haven’t tried it and can find one. They apparently changed the head form for 2017 though.

Northwind – Member

Apparently SRAM butter is now actually slick honey- my pot’s something different but someone told me on here it’s changed.

Good to know, thanks. I bought a syringe of it a few years back and it’s lasting so far, probably because I only use it for droppers and suspension.

Slick Honey is recommended by some manufacturers. SRAM do their own. I’ve shoved chain lube down a dropper in a pinch before. Some lube is better than none, and if guck is getting inside the post that fast you probably have bigger worries than how sticky the lube is.

I’ve settled on KS Levs too.

I ended up learning to service the internal cartridges because they’re not flawless and may eventually start to sag (even if you don’t lift your bike by the seat when the post is down, eventually someone else will), but I’ve had better experiences with them than any other posts I’ve tried, and quad rings for the IFP are cheap.

Southpaw works fine on my carbon bars, I just had to put a few wraps of electrical tape underneath it.

“Don’t punch down” is a great rule of comedy.

If you’re thinking of socks, I’ve found these good for winter:
http://www.camaro.at/en/segeln/socken.php?id=23799

Very warm, waterproof enough even after the seams start to give up, and they’re long enough to just reach under most kneepads.

After a couple of cheap inkjets, I switched to laser (Samsung M2020) and never looked back. Laser printers work, they can be left alone for long periods without anything clogging, and generic toner is cheap compared to page output.

Squarespace might be worth looking at:
https://www.squarespace.com

Gets expensive for people running multiple websites, but for just one it does everything many people need with a friendly interface and a monthly charge much lower than your in-laws are paying. If freelancers approach my brother asking him to build them a portfolio site, that’s where he sends them.

Yep, the contract could say absolutely anything regarding those types of IP. If it’s one they hired a solicitor to write, it’ll be pretty bulletproof. If they wrote it themselves with no experience of contract law, then a solicitor could probably shoot it full of holes in no time.

(I think what you outline is the legal default for photographs too – most photogs and illustrators I’ve hired charge a one off fee and grant a perpetual license to use the imagery in certain ways, and any other use requires renegotiation).

Gumtree probably your best bet for the road bike. Craigslist worth a shot too, as it’s a little more popular in the UK than it used to be. I’ve only found timewasters on Pinkbike for that kind of thing though.

I sold a couple of bikes (road and fixie/single speed) at asking prices recently, using Gumtree, which immediately got them a lot more enquiries compared to months of guffbeaks on PB. With one, literally seconds after the buyer had taken a test ride and handed the money to me, a random deliveroo guy rolled up and said “Hey, I saw your bike on gumtree, is it still for sale?”

When it comes to IP, there should be distinctions between the content of the website (i.e. text, images, video), the visual design, and the code it runs on. IANAL.

I’m also not a web designer, but I do make my own sites+wordpress themes, and a close relation is a commercial web developer. It sounds like whatever package they’ve sold your in-laws is overkill and they’ve turned them into a source of passive income. If the website is basically just an advert with contact info/form, and they’re not doing e-commerce or anything, then hosting can be a lot cheaper than £30 a month. It only took me a couple of days to learn how to make that kind of site.

OTOH, a static site that small is the kind of job that clients can turn into a complete pain in the arse, and a lot of seasoned web developers won’t touch it. Unless you’re just bunging wordpress and an existing theme up for people, doing design work for the low £100’s can become a massive amount of work, admin, sales etc. for tiny returns.

Gifv link because the gif version is nearly 15mb:
http://i.imgur.com/cPXj1c3.gifv

Rule of thirds is the very first thing that’ll massively improve your photography:
http://learnprophotography.com/rule-of-thirds/

Practice that enough and you’ll get your eye in then start to find exceptions, but it’s a good foundation for most images. Some phone cameras even have a thirds grid overlay in the settings.

My second favourite rule is “Zoom with your feet”. Especially if you’re using a phone.

Contrary to advice above, *do* tinker with images in photoshop or another image editor. The purist argument that everything must be done in camera is a load of bollocks, but it’s a doctrinal one you will bump into when you talk to some photographers. The act of composing a photograph in the first place is manipulating the image (“Left a bit to exclude that ugly tree, down a bit to make the greenest grass fill more of the frame… there! much prettier!” etc.). Most pros don’t have hangups about using darkrooms or photoshop to tweak images, you just have to not let it make you lazy. The more work you can do with the camera, the less you have to correct later, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t edit a photo after it’s taken.

theotherjonv – Member
short burst of effort to get some momentum and then ease off the pressure / torque while you change.

This. I once folded a granny ring by not doing that and shifting under load.

If I’m losing momentum on a hill, or know I’m about to for whatever reason, even if I only feel like I need to be one gear down I always shift two to compensate for the momentum loss of easing off the torque. I don’t underestimate the momentum loss as badly or often as I used to, but do sometimes and an extra downshift is a decent way to compensate.

I thought it’d be the flat jawed ones, and I didn’t exactly want to get the molgrips out! Cheers :)

I got one of the posts done and bled, no sag. I do hate servicing the internals of these compared to Levs, but at least bleeding Reverbs is oddly enjoyable and straightforward.

Thanks. It’d have to be the pliers, turns out I do have an 11mm crowfoot, but the jaws are too narrow to fit over the shaft :D

I got one stripped but the IFP seems to be stuck all the way down inside the upper post, making it impossible to remove with zipties as shown in the SRAM video. TBH, after today I’ll be sticking to KS Levs, as they’re much less of a pain in the ass to work on.

Thanks, might give that a go. I think the smallest crowfoot have atm is 12mm though! :evil:

matt_outandabout – Member
All the energy saving light bulbs from the equipment store at the outdoor centre – including the ones illuminating 40 new fangled mountain bikes, circa 1996. The folk in Kirkcudbright are odd

A church hall I lived near as a kid had a dark, walled in, off street car park. They’d never had any trouble, thefts or break-ins before, but saved up and put in some security lights just in case. The night after they installed them, they all got nicked.

A lamb. It was a very photogenic and trusting bottle-fed one. A few months after it went missing, it was mysteriously returned to the field, in desperate need of worming and covered in its own poo.

Edit: Ah. Just saw your most recent post :|

I think it’s the shrinkage that might do you in. I don’t have experience with that one sofa, but I once machine dyed some grubby white Ikea Tullsta armchair covers. They shrank loads and despite lots of wrestling and stretching them back, they never quite went back on correctly.

The only forks we need are pitchforks!

A few recent favourites:

Matt Cremona’s bandsawmill build:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0dX5redvVZQT-bJ-HNfrJEXlQJleCwun
He usually does woodwork, but wanted a sawmill. This enormous machine was also his learning to weld project; he got the bed perfectly straight and level. The bastard! :D

Matthias Wandel is great at showing his process:
https://www.youtube.com/user/Matthiaswandel

Cody’s Lab is one I didn’t watch for years, but he’s incredibly smart and I got into it recently:
https://www.youtube.com/user/theCodyReeder

Smarter Every Day also does slomo, but with interesting stuff explained. Such as this engine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xflY5uS-nnw

Edit: a couple more.

This Old Tony, explains and shows a lot of metalwork in enough depth for any hobbyist, also pretty funny:
https://www.youtube.com/user/featony/videos

Frank Howarth, woodwork mainly, really good at showing and talking about his design process:
https://www.youtube.com/user/urbanTrash/videos

Hah :)

I feel similarly, no matter how much variation or complexity you can put into the systems, it starts to feel flat and repetitive. That did take around 4000 plays for me with Spelunky…

The development required to make the systems things like Nethack and No Man’s Sky sit on isn’t exactly lightweight though.

Procedural generation almost inevitably gets bland and repetitive.

martinhutch – Member
Can’t say I see a decently-made linear (or semi-linear) game is necessarily a bad thing.

It’s not, it’s just that they’re made differently now. While there’ve always been experiments in non-linear story telling (Colony Wars, Erasmotron, Deus Ex), big budget games tend toward linear stories because otherwise, making all that extra stuff gets really expensive, and most players don’t replay enough to see a fraction of it. Doing the kind of simulation that could improvise stories is a really hard problem that we haven’t solved yet.

Half Life 2 had the same mute protagonist as many games that went before, but put a lot of resources into building systems from scratch to simulate body language for non-player characters. Instead of cinematic cutscenes, the player was free to move around, and the NPCs would do certain things automatically like maintain eye contact, body position in relation to the player camera, etc.

Some techniques got copied by other studios, some didn’t, everything moved on. Cinematic cutscenes have survived much better than Valves approach at the time. Along with voice acting, studios and writers seem to prefer that for telling more emotive stories, with a bit more complexity than just casting the player as saviour. The Last Of Us is a good example.

Valve could make HL3 feel like a modern game, or they could make it feel like a Half Life Game, but doing both at once is probably a really difficult design problem. And maybe boring! Unless they start talking a lot about it themselves though, we’ll never know for sure.

They did do something with HL2 I wish more studios would copy, or could afford to: They hired an architect named Viktor Antonov to design City 17. With him, the developers wrote stories about each location, sometimes down to individual rooms, about what had happened there a few days ago, a few months ago, a few years ago and so on. Instead of dumping all that text in diaries or such for the player, they just used that as source material for design and built in all the physical details those stories implied.

(You might recognize a similar visual style from Dishonored, because Arkane Studios hired him too).

Fingers crossed Daz.

scotroutes – Member

Descent!!!

If you liked Descent, check out Sublevel Zero – it was made by a couple of mates from Manchester.

midlifecrashes – Member
Seen elsewhere:

http://www.stanleyparkhigh.org.uk/13/our-team

*snigger*

“Head of Aqua” means swimming teacher I guess? :)

martinhutch – Member

It’s a curious decision by Valve to walk away from the franchise. I would have thought HL3 would be a massive money-spinner for them. Perhaps they just don’t think they could meet expectations?

Their official position is basically “We don’t comment on rumours and speculation”. As far as most people in the videogames industry can tell (and Valve employees are tight-lipped even with their friends), there are two main factors.

Owning Steam and taking a cut of every game sale has made Valve more money than they need. Most studios are one flop, if that, from going bust. Valve have enough money that they can probably function as an independently wealthy organisation for a very long time yet. Team Fortress and DOTA2 have only added to the heap of money, and they were both experiments with new things. HL3 might be a money spinner, but not one they really need that badly.

The kind of linear storytelling that the Half Life games did was revolutionary for it’s time, but as people have said in this thread, things have moved on. Making something that feels like a continuation of the Half Life games yet reflects modern game design is quite a challenge. At various times, small teams seem to have formed internally at Valve and later given up. As you say, fear of not being able to meet expectations could certainly be a factor in that.

ChrisL – Member

And I made a few levels for the original Doom. I’d have said that Doom led the way when it came to PC games with customisable engines and the ability for significant user generated content. Did anyone play AliensTC back in the day? It was brilliant.

I love that even today, Doom still has a modding scene!

With the prototype for an Unreal and a later Source conversion, we uh, *cough* definitely didn’t end up working on Aliens-ish tactical game for six months then stripping every last trace of Fox’s IP out of it before showing it to anyone :D

HL3 hype is some high quality cruel fun, much like watching Star Wars fans getting excited for then disappointed by films in the prequel trilogy was.

There must have been dozens of false starts by fans on suspected ARGs by Valve, etc., screenshots accidentally showing HL3 project folders on Valve computers (“Oh yeah we kind of gave up on that… twice”), and a series of increasingly obtuse fan theories.

Also this from Reddit yesterday, some people discussing just making their own Half Life 3:

Yeah, on most big budget videogames projects, the other 200 – 600 people are just superfluous :D

mattyfez – Member
Arguably the best thing, apart from being a damn fine game at the time, os it made modding kinda mainstream, portal was a hack job originally based on hl2, team fortress, counter strike, it really blew the doors off for customisation.

HISSSSSSSSS. I was an Unreal modder :D

(You’re right, modding has died since but for eight years or so from the time of Half Life and Unreal, it really drove games and the industry forward to new places)

Northwind – Member

**** it, I’m reinstalling Stalker.

A much maligned yet great game! Really unusual for it’s time, seven endings quite cleverly worked out to match your playstyle for the whole game rather than pushing a button near the end, and one of the only FPS games at the time not doing the gung-ho all-American hero thing. And it felt like the world itself HATED you. I’ve not tried it, but heard the Stalker Complete mod makes it even better.

mikewsmith – Member
Was excellent at the time

What mike says. A lot of videogames that were mind blowing 10/10 five stars at the time date badly. HL2 is 13 years old, what seemed like spectacular cinematic set pieces at the time have been eclipsed in each successive generation, and some of the tropes in it weren’t so tired at the time. Ravenholm is probably the best bit, and you get the Gravity gun there.

At least none of it’s Xen from the end of Half Life. Finicky 3D platforming and trying to shoot this giant spider in the bollock with a magnum was where I gave up.

Can you tell me anything about contesting a ticket for driving in a bus lane?

A few favourites I’ve collected over the years (not by having them myself, I hasten to add), all real:

Internet Adventurer
Internet Executive
Spokesperson for the Potato Council
Director of Creation
App Dreamer
National Bowel QA Facilitator (With Public Health England)
Digital Prophet
Innovation Executive

and a fake one someone I know put on business cards for a conference:
Vice President of Synergies and Paradigms

coatesy – Member
All I can add is don’t ignore the advice to do the deep breathing, I did on one of the occasions i’d bruised mine, and suffered random and unexpected knife in the ribs type pains for about 2 years afterwards.

That, and this time round I found out that the persistent shallow breathing you tend to do with a rib injury puts you at increased risk of pneumonia.

(IANAD).

You might be alright to go spin pedals a bit, but if you mash up something technical, ride fast down a rough trail, or start jumping a lot, that could put a lot of forces through your intercostals and make the injury worse.

Exactly what I did after binning it near new year, still waiting for them to heal fully. I’ve been able to ride gently, but after not doing that at first and pulling the injured muscles chucking the bike up a steppy climb, it got much worse. I had a very un-fun week of cramps when walking, lots of pain and painkillers.

Take it easy. If you’ve actually got broken ribs, landing on them again could be a punctured lung.

km79 – Member
I’ve had two pairs of the so called waterproof ultra grip gloves. Both let in water within minutes. I like their socks but these gloves were useless.

Same experience here. Having a big spongy later of water-permeable fabric on top of the actual waterproof bit means the top layer soaks through then the windchill makes them freezing. After an awful twenty mile commute in the rain, I lost one of them running for a train and just thought “Probably for the best”.